Posts Tagged ‘Gu Liu Fang’

I realized after every heart wrenching experience, you grow a little more. Watching this drama and analyzing the relationships in there was very intriguing for me, and let me understand more about myself. Overall, it was a rocky tear jerking ride, but I feel like I have grown from watching it.

It [忘 記時間 “Forgetting Time”] is fit mostly with the relationship between a couple that met 200 years before the story actually takes place. The girl is the descendent of a goddess, and thus cannot die from natural ageing. The guy is training to be a priest, and they meet when the man goes with his religious group into a city as guests.

He meets the girl, and their relationship is innocent and beautiful. At the end of his visit, however, he has to leave. The girl is crushed, but refuses to let the relationship die. The man promises that if after 3 years, she still wants to marry him, then he will stop being a priest and marry her.

He is the most prospective of the group, and his elders hope for him to succeed them as head priest. After three years pass, the man wants to go and keep his promise. His elders lie to him, though, and tell him the girl is dead. He feels disillusioned about the world and accepts his fate. After he attains a higher position in his cultivation, one day sees her again. She has waited for him every day for three years, and touched by her persistence, he runs away with her. Chased by his elders, the two end up before a cliff. There was a legend from before that if two lovers are meant to be together, the clouds would gather. As they knelt there, the clouds dissipated. [Meaning that they shouldn’t] Refusing to let their fate be dictated by others, however, the two jump off the cliff. The man dies, but the girl survives because she isn’t human.

Lin Yeping didn’t realise Zixuan was his lover from his previous life, so what made him yearn for her when he left? Was it because his memories were erased but his feelings weren’t? This article attempts to explore the reasons why Lin Yeping fell for Zixuan and why it was fate they met again.

It was voiced in episode 18 that: “Though Lin Yeping did not go after her, since their first meeting, his heart was already with Zixuan. The more you suppress the feelings of love, the more passionate it gets. No matter how Lin Yeping tried to avoid it, he was unable to ignore the voice of his heart. Besides, it is the will of Heaven.”

Deep inside Yeping’s heart he has already loved Zixuan (from the love that was left over from his previous life as Liufang), so this was why he couldn’t forget about her.
To better explain this, there’s a portion of lyrics from the beautiful ‘Promise to Not Love You‘ song that I’ve always associated with Changqing’s circumstances involving his not being able to remember who Zixuan was. From my perspective, these lyrics fit perfectly with why Yeping’s heart was already with Zixuan since their first meeting and why he starts yearning for her:

“I haven’t had the time to feel sadness. [because he doesn’t remember her, making it easier to disregard her]Love has made its way into my breath. [because she reappeared in his life and tried to get him back]What doesn’t exist, exists at the bottom of the heart. [he was always loving her even though he didn’t know it and doesn’t remember her]”

I’ve been interpreting his dreams by way of focusing on what was happening in the dreams and why. First though, I’d like to explain why I began thinking of an interpretation for his dreams. I started pondering about what his dreams might mean because time and time again, I always found them to be so fascinating, unusual, and mysterious since they had so many mystical elements that had a lot to do with Changqing’s psychological and emotional states (which is what I believe is the cause of him having those dreams, and not Zixuan giving them to him). Here’s something I thought corresponds very well with why I think Yeping and Changqing dreams of Zixuan (even though he may not remember their past lives together):

“Michel de Certeau’s work, in the latter part of the twentieth century, has compared the procedures common to both mysticism and psychoanalysis, suggesting that the body, far from being ruled by discourse, is itself a symbolic language, and that in both psychoanalysis and mysticism the body is perceived as responsible for a truth of which it is unaware. Thus the body holds the ‘key’ to the ‘truth’ of the ‘space’ represented by the mystical or unconscious. This has caused the modern study of mysticism to focus, like psychoanalysis, on the bodily manifestations of the psyche’s or soul’s condition in order to understand the ‘truth’ of that condition.” — excerpt from http://www.answers.com/topic/mysticism
Changqing/Yeping was unaware of the ‘truth’ because he couldn’t remember his past memories.

Written by lovelikethis
‘They’re in love with each other. Why couldn’t Changqing and Zixuan stay together in the end?”

This question constantly comes up during the final heartbreaking scene where the couple “forget each other”. Their love spanned for over 200 years in three-life times, aren’t they fated to be together? Why, after everything they’ve been through, does Zixuan force him to ‘let go’? Isn’t it somewhat selfish on Zixuan’s part for insisting to be involved in his life (when Changqing resisted) and when he finally admits how much he loves her, she makes him just “forget everything”. Shouldn’t he have the right to choose his own happiness, and make decisions for himself?

It’s not all as simple as that. Zixuan was mistaken in the beginning of their third lifetime together. At first, she was given false hope because she realized that Changqing still remembers some of their memories together (during that scene when she finds him unconscious leaning on a tree in the forest). So because she thought that he’d be lonely without her (and because she always wants the best for him), she was mistaken in believing that the best thing to do is to get back with him, because at that time she thought that if Changqing still remembers her, those remaining memories and her love for him was enough for her to pursue him again. She thought that somewhere deep in his heart, he must have some kind of yearning for her if he was still able to remember her even after his memories were sealed, and this is why it made her want to be with him again and believed that her fate was to be together with Changqing one last time.read more »

Zixuan finally learns to love selflessly in the end. It’s very interesting how Zixuan learns and grows as the three lifetimes go along.

It was in Zixuan and Changqing/Liufang’s first lifetime that Zixuan learned what love was and how to love for the very first time. In the beginning she loved selfishly, but I think that’s natural when you finally find someone you love and want to be with for the rest of your life. Doesn’t everyone start out loving selfishly anyway? It was the first stage of love for her, and in their first lifetime Zixuan was the sweet, innocent and naive girl who only wanted to be a matchmaker and be Liufang’s bride. She hadn’t gone through the kind of pain and heartbreak that love can cause until she meets Liufang. After spending time together, Liufang tells Zixuan that if she still loved him after three years, he’ll marry her, and being the cute and naive girl who still retained her innocence, Zixuan smiles happily and agrees, thinking that nothing could ever go wrong. Three years later they both meet each other at the lake again, Zixuan sees him, gets mad so she runs off, Liufang runs after her and she slaps him. But then a moment later they reconcile and he leans in to kiss her; and it’s so bitter-sweet because I think that what Liufang did here was actually the very thing that made Zixuan fall even harder for him. I mean, if you think about yourself in her shoes, the guy who told you to wait three years didn’t keep his promise but then you learn that it was actually a misunderstanding on his part, and then he leans in to kiss you (just seconds after you were mad at him): I would think that this made Zixuan hold on even tighter to her love for him, because now she gets it that he really truly does love her the way she loves him. I think it was their first kiss (who Liufang initiated) that actually made her believe and grip tighter onto their love, hence one of the reasons why she appears to him in the second lifetime after they both willingly jumped off the cliff with each other.